Rendering out 32bit and retaining the look

[Walter Soyka]

You are not setting color management up correctly. Here’s my intro to color management in Ae:

Different color profiles may use the same RGB numbers to represent different colors. For example, a specific RGB value in Adobe RGB may look different on-screen than it does in Rec. 709, and Adobe RGB and Rec. 709 may use different RGB numbers to represent the same color.

The goal of color management is to keep the appearance of color consistent across profiles and devices. To do that, you must define how the color is coming in (by interpreting your footage with the correct profile), and also define how it’s going out (by choosing a working space that matches your destination, or by choosing another working space and adding a profile that matches your destination to the output module).

Following this idea, Ae’s color management brings in images and movies, converts them from their native color profiles into the working space, performs all the additional mathematics for effects and blending in the working space, then optionally converts from the working space to an output profile for previews (using your monitor profile) and renders (using the output profile specified in the item’s output module).

[Sam Freeman] ”
Item 1: My output from a linearized colour space.What I want!
Item 2: A 16bit convert in photoshop and the colour space not embedded on save. What I want!”

If you do not correctly define the input profile for Ae footage items, you may not get the results you expect, because the system has no way of knowing what color you intend to display with the specific RGB values stored in the image. For a very rough analogy, think of it this way: an image with a profile embedded describes color like an absolute address, like “100 Main Street, Anytown, USA.” It’s a precise and specific value, and you can get there from anywhere. An image without a profile describes color like relative directions: “take the second left, then take the first right. ” It only works if you happen to be in the right spot to begin with.

I notice item 1 is ProPhoto RGB (linear), so we’ll go with that. (I am guessing that when you saved item 2 out of Photoshop, you saved it in sRGB, even though you didn’t tag it as such.)

[Sam Freeman] “There are 3 stills and a screengrab of my settings”

It looks like you’re using ProPhoto as your working space.

Assuming you’re delivering in HD, let’s change the working space to Rec. 709 (so your outputs will default to Rec. 709, which any HD player will expect).

[Sam Freeman] “Item 3: An output from after effects with preserve RGB selected What I don’t want!”

You’re right, you sure don’t want that. Preserve RGB passes the RGB values through unchanged — so the color space transformation necessary to preserve the appearance of your colors from ProPhoto RGB to a computer or HD display is not happening. It’s basically a checkbox to disable color management.

This is very useful for data passes (like position passes, motion vectors, depth passes, etc.), but it’s rarely a good idea to engage this for an image pass.

[Sam Freeman] “I find if I bring the 32bit stills into AFX and export 16bit I get the result of item 3. If I go via photoshop I get Item 2.”

Check out the image below (but please be aware that your browser may or may not be color-managed — for critical viewing, bring it into Ae, enable color management, and note that the JPEG itself is sRGB).

That’s all done using Ae’s color management, as described above. Is the bottom image what you expect to see?

5258_freemancolormanagement.jpg

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Sam Freeman]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for that excellent (and very clear) explanation of what is going on. The bottom frame is exactly what I was hoping for.

So that’s bringing the 32bit TIFFs I’ve rendered into After Effects – which is great. So if I wanted to avoid the step of rendering out 32bit TIFF’s and reimporting the sequence I can still retain the look of the ProPhoto RGB colour space by rendering out from AFX but specifying the Colour space to export to?

So I could render a 16bit TIFF sequence – as long as I assign a colour profile such as Rec.709 in the colour management dialogue? Is my understanding accurate? (I’m rendering so I can’t check it out, but I will asap).

Thanks for your time – this is really helping!

[Tom Daigon]

Whew, great explanation Walter. Ive always done color management but never had such a clear understanding of why I was doing it. Thanks!

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
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[Walter Soyka]

[Sam Freeman] “Thanks for that excellent (and very clear) explanation of what is going on. The bottom frame is exactly what I was hoping for.”

Glad to help. I’ve written pretty extensively on color management on this forum, so a quick search here on “color management” should return a bunch of different variations on this post. Each are somewhat targeted to their own specific threads, but put together should be a pretty comprehensive overview.

There are a couple good Adobe resources, too:

After Effects / Color management [link]

Color management workflow in After Effects CS4 [link] (still applicable to CS6)

[Sam Freeman] “So that’s bringing the 32bit TIFFs I’ve rendered into After Effects – which is great. So if I wanted to avoid the step of rendering out 32bit TIFF’s and reimporting the sequence I can still retain the look of the ProPhoto RGB colour space by rendering out from AFX but specifying the Colour space to export to?”

The color profile you’re rendering to should match what the next element in the workflow (whatever that is) expects, because if the next application to touch the file doesn’t understand the color space correctly, it will not show the colors correctly.

If you’re working in HD, you most likely want to set your output module to use Rec. 709.

I don’t think it matters what your working space is if you’re working in 32bpc in Ae; with floating point math, all the color spaces are unbounded. If you are working in 16bpc or 8bpc, you want to make sure that your working space is large enough at least to encompass all your outputs. I generally recommend working in the color space of your output for simplicity’s sake.

[Sam Freeman] “So I could render a 16bit TIFF sequence – as long as I assign a colour profile such as Rec.709 in the colour management dialogue? Is my understanding accurate? (I’m rendering so I can’t check it out, but I will asap).”

Yes. By default, output modules will output in the working space, but you can override this in the output module’s color management tab and Ae will transform from the working space to the output space on render.

FYI, with the display color management option enabled (under the View menu), Ae will transform colors from the working space to your monitor’s space, independent of the output space. If you have a reasonably nice monitor and a reasonably nice probe (I use the i1 Display Pro), you can get reasonably accurate color on your display.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Tom Daigon] “Whew, great explanation Walter.”

I am not a color scientist, but I play one on the Internet!

[Tom Daigon] ” Ive always done color management but never had such a clear understanding of why I was doing it. Thanks!”

Color management is important when you are bringing multiple different kinds of inputs together, or when your inputs are in a different color space than your outputs must be.

You could leave color management off if all your inputs match your output. For example, if you’re compositing multiple HD videos, everything will probably be Rec. 709, so there’s no need to convert colors. (However, disabling color management also naturally disables display color management, so you’ll lose the benefit of a profiled monitor.)

One final note: Premiere is not color managed, so any prep work in Ae and Ps should take that into account!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Andy Engelkemier]

Walter looks like the dude I need help from. I read through this and it seems like you’re referring some to imported colors vs ouput colors.
The thing is I’m having troubles with things created Inside of AfterEffects. I didn’t import anything.

I wanted a nice light flash effect on something. 8bit wasn’t cutting it. And I remembered a trick using 32bit. Using 32bit, you can do things like glow and blur, and if they are above a value of 1 (255RGB) then the effect gets more realistically applied.

The issue is, I too am having problems outputting what I’m looking at. It looks GREAT…..on screen. It looks like real lighting. As soon as I render it, the effect is gone. Adobe has never been great at converting colors, in my opinion. Or has never been great at giving Us a choice in how we want them converted. Like….maybe CMYK, 0,0,0,0 should equal RBG 0,0,0 instead of 27,27,27?

I’ve tried blending colors in the linear workspace, but that clamps it Really ugly like. I just want what I see.
If a value is over 1, I just want white. So 4,4,10? That’s not blue on screen. It’s white. I just want what I see, clamped to 255. But I want to keep all the other linear colors how I see them. I don’t want it to convert the contrast, because that looks bad.

So I’m looking for a reasonable way to get what I’m looking for.

Yeah, I could render out to a 32bit image format. Then run them through photoshop with an action…..OR, if I just know how to set the dang thing up correctly, I could just render it out so that it renders what I’m looking it. I mean, i knows the RGB conversion, because that’s what I’m looking at on my screen. But then when it goes and renders it, a value of 4,4,10 is blue, and a value of 4,4,4 right next to it is just white. It seems to be doing the rest of the light calculations how I would expect, which is odd.

Any help here? I thought about just adding an adjustment layer, and seeing if I could just clamp the colors to limit the output, but I don’t think that would work.

[Walter Soyka]

I’ll try to help, Andy. Can you post some screenshots? I’m interested in your project color settings, what it looks like while you’re working, your output settings, and what it looks like after you’ve rendered.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Andy Engelkemier]

So I’m Sure I’m just doing all sorts of things wrong, but I can’t for the Life of me, figure out why this isn’t working.
I’m rendering out to standard H.264. I tried checking the “Render at Maximum Depth” box, but no change. The preview there still looks correct, but when I look at the file…..blue.

So “A” is a screengrab from the mp4 output. “B” is how that frame (or close to it) should actually look.
I added “C” so you could see what’s causing the blue flower looking thing.

I only get the right effect when in 32bit mode with Linearize and Blend turned Off, as shown. I tried rendering with them on as well, and Yay, no blue, but they don’t get the right look.

Again, there’s no footage here other than one still image being used in the background.
And I have Zero concern if this is Technically correct or not. I just want to learn how to render what I’m seeing. I mean, that’s what we’re all after right? I found what I’d like something to look like, but I can’t get it to actually render out.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re explaining. My monitor is 8 bit, and I’m outputting to an 8 bit format. I won’t be editing the video further, so I’m not sure why 10 bit would make sense.

Am I making something that can be replicated in playback? Absolutely! It’s white! You can replicate white in 1 bit color!

The issue I’m having is not the output bits. It’s the question of when AfterEffects/Media Encoder, is actually converting colors. In photoshop, if you have a 32bit image, and you want to save that as a jpeg, which is going to be 8 bit, you just have to save it while adjusting the gamma to .4545, which is the inverse of 2.2 because the 32bit image you are looking at has a gamma of 1.0.

I’m just mostly confused because the thumbnail preview of the render is coming out how I see it in AfterEffects.

Basically I’m asking if the only way to render this out is to render it to a 32bit format, then convert that in an image processor afterward. That seems crazy to me, but wouldn’t surprise me.

[Walter Soyka]

Got it. Looks like AME is not handling the overbrights from Dynamic Link correctly.

Two things to try:

1) Work in Rec. 709 instead of Adobe RGB. (Note that changing the working color space means you may need to tweak some of your effects to get the same results.)

2) Apply a Levels effect on an adjustment layer at the top of your comp. Don’t touch the histogram, the inputs, gamma or outputs — just set “Clip To Output White” to “On.”

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]